Kavli Affiliate: Jacqueline N. Hewitt
| First 5 Authors: Honggeun Kim, Nicholas S. Kern, Jacqueline N. Hewitt, Bang D. Nhan, Joshua S. Dillon
| Summary:
One key challenge in detecting 21 cm cosmological signal at z > 6 is to
separate the cosmological signal from foreground emission. This can be studied
in a power spectrum space where the foreground is confined to low delay modes
whereas the cosmological signal can spread out to high delay modes. When there
is a calibration error, however, chromaticity of gain errors propagates to the
power spectrum estimate and contaminates the modes for cosmological detection.
The Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) employs a high-precision
calibration scheme using redundancy in measurements. In this study, we focus on
the gain errors induced by nonredundancies arising from feed offset relative to
the HERA’s 14 meter parabolic dish element, and investigate how to mitigate the
chromatic gain errors using three different methods: restricting baseline
lengths for calibration, smoothing the antenna gains, and applying a temporal
filter prior to calibration. With 2 cm/2 degree perturbations for
translation/tilting motions, a level achievable under normal HERA operating
conditions, the combination of the baseline cut and temporal filtering
indicates that the spurious gain feature due to nonredundancies is
significantly reduced, and the power spectrum recovers the clean
foreground-free region. We found that the mitigation technique works even for
large feed motions but in order to keep a stable calibration process, the feed
positions need to be constrained to 2 cm for translation motions and 2 degree
for tilting offset relative to the dish’s vertex.
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